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April 14, 2014 | By Robyn Dixon, This post has been updated. See the notes below for details.

PRETORIA, South Africa -- Reeva Steenkamp, the 29-year-old model and girlfriend of South African Olympic athlete Oscar Pistorius, had a sports bag packed with her clothes, ready to leave his house, the night he fatally shot her, prosecutor Gerrie Nel told Pretoria's high court Monday. The only items not yet packed were a pair of jeans and a pair of flip-flops. Pistorius, on trial for murder, denied there had been a quarrel and she was about to leave. Pistorius, who contends he shot at the enclosed toilet in which Steenkamp had locked herself because he believed an intruder was there, told the court he screamed at the imagined stranger to get out of his house.

They came as they were - in sandals, without makeup, their hair a bit askew. A little girl with her plastic doll. A mother of one with her pregnant belly. A cowboy with wild horses galloping on his shirt. It was picture day on the Eastside not long ago, and people - grandmothers, couples, children and teenagers - lined up to pose. The shoots were spontaneous, set up on the street without notice, as part of a 40th-anniversary project organized by Self Help Graphics & Art, Boyle Height's historic community art center.

ORLAND, Calif. -- A witness to Thursday's deadly tour bus crash said the driver of the FedEx truck appeared to lose control while changing lanes before barreling across the center median of Interstate 5 and colliding head-on with a tour bus filled with high school students. Ryan Householder told The Times on Saturday that he was mowing his lawn, which faces the southbound lanes of the highway, when he heard screeching tires Thursday. He looked up and watched the crash occur. The drivers of both vehicles were killed as were eight people on board the tour bus. "I never thought I'd see that in real life," he said.

Clad in a military-style flight suit and aviator shades, Harrison Ford walks across a sunny tarmac and climbs into a fighter jet and takes off. Soon, he's soaring 5,000 feet above California. Ford is not starring as the hero of a summer blockbuster but in fact is tagging along on a NASA mission to measure levels of methane and carbon dioxide, two primary greenhouse gases, in the atmosphere in the premiere of Showtime's new climate-change documentary, "Years of Living Dangerously.

Facebook began notifying users of its mobile app Wednesday that it will soon disable the app's messaging feature. The Menlo Park, Calif., tech giant is instructing users to download the Facebook Messenger app -- a distinct entity from its main app -- if they wish to continue messaging friends from their smartphones. The Facebook Messenger app has been available for a number of years, and users who have both apps installed already can only message others through the separate app. But soon, all users will be forced to download the second app if they want to be able to message friends.

Albuquerque police have used deadly force more often than necessary, resulting in a series of unjustified fatal shootings by officers, according to a damning report released Thursday by the U.S. Justice Department. Acting Assistant Atty. Gen. Jocelyn Samuels said the Albuquerque Police Department needed a "systematic change" to address a long-ingrained culture of using deadly force - a culture the report called indifferent to operating within constitutional guidelines. "This is no longer an acceptable way to proceed," Samuels said.

Three months after it painted L.A. as a metropolis stumbling into decline, the Los Angeles 2020 Commission offered 13 recommendations Wednesday that it said would attract jobs and "put the city on a path to fiscal stability. " The group of prominent business, labor and civic leaders called on elected officials to enact a wide-ranging series of policy initiatives: increasing the minimum wage, combining giant twin harbors into a single port, altering oversight of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and bolstering efforts to promote regional tourism.

Don Mattingly didn't have to come to the ballpark Monday, so the Dodgers manager said he got his hair cut, inflated the tires on his bicycle and, basically, took the evening off. "A lot of nothing," he said with a smile. "It was productive. " That remains to be seen. Because for players accustomed to playing every day over a six-month schedule, the start to the Dodgers' season has been a whole lot of nothing. BOX SCORE: Dodgers 3, Tigers 2 (10) Monday's off day was the third in eight days for the Dodgers, who get two more days off over the next week.

The director and some cast members of "Sharknado 2: The Second One" appeared on stage in a Pasadena hotel on Tuesday to preview the upcoming airborne shark sequel and touched on a very serious topic: climate change. Whoever could have predicted that Ian Ziering taking on flying sharks with a chain saw would give Al Gore a run for his cinematic money? Costar Judah Friedlander, the guy who always wore trucker caps on "30 Rock," plays a childhood friend of Ziering's character and proclaimed the film about a weather phenomenon involving flying sharks "the most important ever made about climate change.

It came during a pause in the national anthem, loud and clear. “Fire D'Antoni!” was the yell from a single fan before the Lakers played Houston on Tuesday. Don't tell that to Steve Nash, who came to the defense of Lakers Coach Mike D'Antoni earlier in the day. “With the amount of injuries and the rebuilding and the evaluating different players, I don't know that any coach is going to be real successful this season,” Nash said. “John Wooden is not going to be dealt a great hand with all the change and injuries we've had. You look at it every week, someone else goes down.” The Lakers will take their time evaluating D'Antoni.